The Idea of The Beacon
It all began when I had the idea for a new, fully illustrated, colour e-magazine, to be released monthly or bi-monthly, covering the fields of art, culture, travel, metaphysics, writing and so on, with an emphasis on positivity; the aim would be to uplift its readers' spirits.
There were a few reasons why I thought this was a good idea:
1. That the world needs more positivity is probably undeniable. Due to factors which I will probably go into at greater length another time, our culture is predisposed to negativity — for the last couple of centuries, a gradual shift has occurred towards further and further segmentation of thought and emotion, and while this has brought about splendid achievements in the fields of technology, medicine and our understanding of things physical, one of the spin-off effects has been a tremendous depression of things less physical and more spiritual. The new magazine, which I call The Beacon (‘a fire or light set up in a high or prominent position as a warning, signal, or celebration’) was to be a small effort in the opposite direction.
2. I also wanted to ‘bust out’ of the world of writers and writing. It’s a large enough universe and there’s plenty to discuss and enjoy within it, but many matters were coming to my attention which didn’t quite fit inside it and so I developed The Beacon as an outlet for them.
3. Following on from that, given that The Beacon would be free to download, I thought it might help the writing community (with whom I am extremely familiar and whom I regard as a kind of extended family) reach new readers, potentially anyway. These new readers would not have to make even a small financial commitment to read the new magazine, and they would be people interested in art, culture, travel, metaphysics (‘the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space’) and anything uplifting, including the occasional joke. Those same readers, I reasoned, might respond to ads placed by authors whose work aligned with those topics. It remains to be seen if I am right about that.
The question of funding came up, as it always does.
Funding would have to be through advertising placed in the magazine. But if I offered a good rate and promoted the opportunity, perhaps I could just about make this work, I thought.
What I ran into next was that none of this was real enough for people to commit their hard-earned money to advertising. Why invest funds in something about which they only had a vague idea?
Fair enough, I thought — hence The Beacon Fellowship. This is a Facebook group, free to join and post in, which might help people get a flavour of what the new magazine would be like. If I ran that group for a while, maybe more people would then decide to put some money towards an ad in a magazine which would effectively be an extension of the group, I mused.
So far, that’s more or less what’s happened: some people, having joined the group, have sent in £20.00 for a one-page full colour ad in the proposed magazine. You can do so here if you wish:
The plan is to get a pilot issue of the magazine out in January or February of 2021. Depending on how that goes, I’ll make further plans for the rest of that year.
Submissions have been open for a while and you can read the guidelines here:
I’m hoping to brighten up people’s lives, offer a channel for topics and material not frequently seen elsewhere, and maybe even help some writers make some money from book sales, myself included.
Let’s see what happens.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to drop me a line:
I don’t bite and can usually help.